


Candid Camera

by Siria



Series: Nantucket AU [56]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-31
Updated: 2008-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:40:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you've got to have a sort-of-almost sister-in-law in your life, John thinks, then you could do a hell of a lot worse than Jeannie Miller.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candid Camera

**Author's Note:**

> For Dogeared at Christmas.

If you've got to have a sort-of-almost sister-in-law in your life, John thinks, then you could do a hell of a lot worse than Jeannie Miller. The one time he'd met Dave's sisters-in-law, John had found them formal and frozen, the fine lines around their mouths not the product of laughter; he knows Teyla's keeps a distance born of mutual dislike. Jeannie, though—she's got all her brother's prickly warmth, and an ease with herself that Rodney is only beginning to acquire; she's brilliant and more than a little wise, bakes the best organic brownies, and has a sense of humour that clicks with John's own; she lives a continent away, so John doesn't have to put up with weekly sibling tofu-related incidents, but she'll make no fuss about dragging Kaleb and Madison all the way over to Nantucket if circumstances demand it.

John knows he's got a lot of reasons to appreciate her, but right now he can't think of any one more important than the fact that Jeannie's got a Flickr feed and knows how to use it. In the long, slow week after Christmas—when the skies over Nantucket are the lowering grey that promises ice storms and steady winds, and John's lungs rattle with each exhale—the fact that the wifi signal is at its strongest on the couch and Jeannie is uploading a steady stream of McKay family holiday snaps are the only things keeping John entertained, and therefore sane.

While Rodney's in the kitchen rustling up their traditional festive fare—spicy turkey pizza; a reheated mound of the mashed potatoes that both of them swear Teyla must lace with crack; slices of a fresh, round loaf of Portuguese bread from Something Natural, perfect for scooping up leftover cranberry sauce—John pretends to watch a re-run of an old football game on the TV while hitting refresh on his MacBook, over and over.

Jeannie's not bothering to go in chronological order, preferring it seems to save her energies for her captions. They're wry and fond, and sometimes a little caustic, and John sees: a three-year-old Mer, staring up at the camera in the bleached-out technicolour of the early seventies, expression mutinous and knees scabbing over; a sixteen-year-old Rodney, his hair longer and blonder than John's ever known it, arms crossed over his skinny chest, looking away from the camera while his bulging book bag rests against his hip; someone's birthday party, Mer and toddler Jeannie covered in streamers, Mer's arms wrapped around his sister with brotherly pride, the two of them beaming up at whoever's photographing them. It does something impossibly strange to John's breathing when he looks at that photo—when he realises that film and frame so rarely captured uncomplicated happiness for the McKay children.

If it's something Jeannie's picked up on, she makes no mention of it in her accompanying captions—just comments about Rodney's hairstyles which make John privately glad that she's never seen the photos of him which surely survive back in Virginia, the ones which reveal John's battles with acne and his misguided attempts to tame his hair into something approaching cool. Mentions of relatives and dates, too, things that Rodney's never mentioned—inconsequential things in and of themselves, but John files them all away, things he knows now but will never mention—and photographic evidence of the aftermath of Rodney's eighteenth birthday that he discreetly saves to his hard drive. (Rodney's naked butt, it seems, was a lot skinnier back then.)

There's a clunk and a clatter from the kitchen; the sound of the fridge opening. "Wanna beer?" Rodney calls, his voice muffled as he goes in search of what are surely the last few bottles to survive their private little Christmas.

"You have to ask?" John croaks.

"Doesn't go so well with your cough medicine," Rodney says, but John can already hear the clink of bottles, plural, being pulled out and set on the countertop.

Most of the photos date to before Rodney went away to college for the first time, the flood of photos that Jeannie and Georgina McKay had taken of their family fading to a trickle after mid-1984. Candids of a child-Meredith asleep on a mottled-green sofa, snot-nosed and mouth agape, are replaced by formal posed holiday snaps, his father's hand heavy on Rodney's shoulder. Once Rodney turns twenty-four, twenty-five, there are hardly any of him at all—and really, that shouldn't be such a loss, that's barely a decade or so before John first caught sight of him on a wind-swept beach. And yet John finds that those are the years he misses seeing the most, because he thinks those are the years when Rodney might have been most a stranger to him—because as Rodney turns from twenty to twenty-four to twenty-eight, as his hairline starts to recede and his chest broaden, as John begins to know how the span of Rodney's biceps will feel beneath his fingertips, the less John thinks he knows the man in the photos on the screen in front of him.

The line of his mouth is defiant for all the wrong reasons; his gaze at the camera too direct, as if daring the photographer to suggest that he might want to unfold his arms, to relax the stark hunch of his shoulders. John looks at one of the last photos of the McKays all together while he weathers out another coughing fit—he calculates, estimates years, and thinks that while this Rodney was defying the camera, John must have been on the other side of the world, squinting into the light of the Kuwaiti desert sun. He wonders what each would have made of the other, twenty years ago; John wonders if they would even have been friends.

Rodney bustles into the living room just as John starts to load the last photo of Jeannie's current batch of scans. He sets the tray of food down onto the table—piping hot, the steam billows off the food in such clouds that even John can smell it through his bunged-up nose—and then hurries back into the kitchen to fetch the beer and set out some fresh food for Cash and Planck. This means that he misses the beginning of John's laughing fit, coming back into the living room only when his _har har har_s have tipped John over the edge into a coughing fit so strong his ribs ache with it.

"What?" Rodney says. "_What_?" He peers at the TV screen, at John, out the window, at the dog, searching for the source of John's mysterious amusement and then squinting at John when nothing immediately presents itself. "Have you been chugging from the Robitussen bottle again? Because I've told you, that—"

"Your—" John manages between barking coughs, banging himself on the chest with the heel of his hand in a futile attempt to get his lungs to open up a little more. "You—you have—"

"Oh my god." Rodney's eyes widen, his jaw slackening with the kind of shock that only an overactive brain can impart. "The fever's gone to your brain, hasn't it? It has. Oh my god, I need to call Jennifer, do you have her number? No, no, wait, she's at Ronon's for the holidays isn't she, where's the phone, if Cash's eaten it again, I'll—"

John shakes his head weakly. "Your—_pink_?"

Rodney stares at him. "Brain fever," he says firmly.

John struggles up into a sitting position, blanket tangling around his legs while he turns his laptop around so that Rodney can see what's on the screen: a formal posed photograph of a beaming Rodney in his engineering doctoral robes, degree clutched in both hands. "Pink with white fur trim? And a _pouffy hat_?"

Rodney tilts his chin up. "It's called a Tudor bonnet, and it has a long and, dare I say, _glorious_ history in Commonwealth universities as a symbol of—"

"A _bonnet_?"

"It was my very first doctorate!" Rodney flings his hands up in the air, startling Planck, who had been attempting to nap on the mantelpiece. "Sue me, I was feeling sentimental."

"It's a _velvet bonnet_, Rodney."

"Oh, oh, right," Rodney says, "and that of course makes me the instant object of much manly mirth, whereas the virile members of the United States Air Force get to prance around in _garters_—"

"That's just the dress uniform!"

"It's underwear! That makes it easily ten times more effeminate than wearing a historical bonnet."

"It is _not_ ten times more—"

"I've worked it out! Mathematically! And I'm sure if I aske—"

"We are _not_ calling Teyla to ask her to adjudicate on this one. If we interrupt Torren's first Christmas, she'll have our _spleens_," John says, pointing a finger at Rodney. "And mine's feeling delicate enough already."

Rodney's mouth twitches. "You may have a point. Now eat your food before it gets cold."

John closes his MacBook and sets it on the floor before tugging the coffee table closer to him. "Yes, mother." He digs his spoon into the bowl of mashed potatoes and dumps about half a pound of them onto his plate, so rich and buttery that they stick stubbornly to his spoon and John has to lick it clean. "And just so you know, I see the subject change you pulled there."

"Full marks for basic use of logic," Rodney mumbles, sitting cross-legged on the floor so that his back is pressed warm and solid against John's legs, and beginning on the highly technical task of cutting the pizza into precise eighths.

There's something approaching silence while they eat—even with the brief war over the last slice of pizza, which is declared a rather unsatisfying truce when the slice falls to the floor and is snatched up by a still-hungry Cash—and by the time they're both full, Rodney's slumped so that his head is pillowed on John's thigh, and John has let one hand fall to rest on top of Rodney's head. John switches over to one of the movie channels—_Terminator 2_ is playing, it looks like, and Arnold is blowing shit up with gusto—and it's nice, that the two of them are getting this time alone together, even if it's been caused in part by the mother of all chest infections on John's part, and a case of scientist's block on Rodney's.

John is distracted from his appreciative contemplation of Sarah Connor's arm muscles—the woman could probably bench press _him_, and damn if that thought isn't more than a little hot—when Rodney shifts and says, "Jeannie sent it to you?"

"Yeah."

"Just that one?"

"Couple others."

"Oh."

The on-screen explosion isn't loud enough to cover the huff of Rodney's exhale.

"Hey." John nudges Rodney gently with one knee. "She wasn't trying to—I asked."

Rodney turns his head just enough so that he can look John in the eye; in the dim twilight and the flicker of light from the TV, John can only make out Rodney's eyes, the stubbled line of his jaw. "Oh?" he says, and its always most dangerous when Rodney's not telegraphing his every emotion in the brisk staccato of his voice, in the flicker of fingers and eyelashes.

"Stop being an ass," John says, exasperation warring with fondness in his voice. "It wasn't—I just wanted to _see_, is all."

There's a pause, one in which John feels supremely awkward and hopes that a fuller explanation than that will not be demanded of him, because most of the time John doesn't even understand _himself_, but if he knows anything, it's that this wasn't, couldn't ever be, mockery—but then Rodney's mouth twitches with something that John hopes is amusement and says, "Yes, well, that would explain the _photos_."

"Jerk," John says, and tries not to sigh with relief because that will only make him cough. He tugs on Rodney's arm until Rodney grumbles and mutters and clambers gracelessly up onto the couch; John allows Rodney to arrange him like an over-sized rag doll, John's back pressed to Rodney's chest and Rodney's arms around him.

"You're going to give me your germs," Rodney says, while tightening his arms around John and pressing a kiss or two to John's hair, flattened and matted though it is with illness's neglect.

"Shut up," John says, smacking Rodney on the thigh, "We're having a moment"—and when he inhales, it's slow and easy, as clean as if this were the start of them; as if John knows their every possible beginning, their only plausible end.


End file.
